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Screams in Silence and DV Campaigns
Drawn Together - The Movie is obviously going to take me awhile to review, so in that while I'm going to talk about a few more reviews where I have more to say. The review for Screams in Silence is 15 minutes long, and in that time I gave the episode a fairly good thrashing. Unfortunately what they decided to talk about was so serious and they tackled it in such a wrong way that I could have talked about tangential things for twice that amount of time. So, let's talk about everything. First of all, this episode tackles the most stereotypical type of domestic violence: a strong domineering man physically abusing a helpless woman. That's the common perception of what domestic violence is, and in some very sad cases they believe that it's the only way it could happen. Yeah, we're going to some dark places today. First of all, about half of domestic violence is reciprocal (1-2). This means that it is a family considering of a miserable man and a miserable woman hurting each other in a variety of sad and terrible ways. What you see in your average Lifetime Movie of the Week or your average PSA about domestic violence is the minority of actual scenarios. And yes, there are situations where the woman is the unreciprocal abuser. And there can be domestic violence in both gay and lesbian couples as well. We're going to be talking about all of this stuff today and why these faulty scare tactics and stereotypes actually hurt victims of domestic violence. We have to get some misconceptions out of the way first. A lot of people think that a woman can't physically hurt a man, or that he could easily defend himself against any woman. Well, if that ain't sexist against both sexes. Do you know what a man does when he wants to hurt something stronger than himself and is easily able to defend itself (say, a grizzly bear)? He uses a weapon. And it turns out that when women have that goal in mind, they do that too. But honestly it's not that hard to hurt your average person if you catch them off guard. I'm sure that most people know that both sexes are equally capable of psychological abuse, financial abuse, and emotional abuse. Or at the very least, I'd like to know the hoops of sexist logic you'd have to go through to think otherwise. But what about sexual abuse? I'm going to be talking about this more in my Peter-Assment ''review, but to make it quick: an erection is a physical process, not a sexual one. Saying that a man was not raped because he had an erection (or ejaculated) is like saying that a woman was not raped because she had an orgasm. Both are wrong, regressive, victim blaming, and awful. But let's talk about why portrayals of domestic violence like this are bad for ''everyone. I mean with men, people a.) don't think it exists b.) blame him for not being able to defend himself c.) laugh d.) blame him for the fight. How does this harm women? Simple, for the reason that most domestic violence isn't like that. This stops people from thinking that the more common forms of domestic violence aren't serious enough to do something about. That included the victim of domestic violence, by the way. By portraying every single scenario of domestic violence as a weak person being close to death, someone actually in said scenario is likely to think that their own situation isn't that bad. If he's psychological abusing you by gaslighting and making you think that you're going crazy, or she's isolating you from your friends and family by attempting to destroy all contact with them where does that stand next to a complete beat-down? Both of those examples are indiscriminately examples of abuse. Because that's what intentional abuse is: an attempt to coerce and control the other person. Every type of abuse is a manner in which to control someone else, and the abuser will use whatever method that they are best at. Or which they can get away with the longest. I'm betting you that there's someone out there that thinks that they're the perfect partner simply because they don't hit the other person in the relationship. Now, let's talk about children. I know that I've seen brochures that depict a boy and a girl, both in an abusive situation. One of them says "When I grow up, I will beat my wife." The other one says "When I grow up, I will be beaten by my boyfriend." Let's ignore the sexism for a minute, and talk about what sympathy porn does to victims. These brochures are aimed at adults who can give their money to whatever shelter or organization, but what happens when you show these to the actual children in abusive situations? The boy's going to grow up self-loathing and think that he's going to be a monster and the girl's going to grow up think that her life is destined to be one abusive situation after another. Granted, it sometimes happens (which is why parenting classes should be mandatory in school), but that's not something you should flat out be telling kids and it can be fixed with therapy and proper education about healthy relationships. Even when sympathy porn is not distorting the facts, it's sending bad messages. Yes, domestic violence is bad and we should do our best to stop it but we need more than just knee-jerk reactions. Do you know why my younger sister couldn't stay with her grandmother away from her abusive mother? It's because that abusive mother could call the cops and use them as her own armed strongmen to keep the kids in line. Yeah, about that... did you know that things like primary aggressor laws and no-question false accusations really help certain people with that whole "coerce and control" thing? No one wants a scenario of "the courts don't believe her, and they send her back where she gets beaten and killed." But in attempts to make that 100% impossible (which probably haven't worked), many people have been given an inaccurate picture of domestic violence, and we've been given a scenario "the courts must believe her no matter what she says, and he goes to jail, and has a bunch of other bad stuff happen to him where he ends up wishing he were dead." To some people, that's a fair trade off. I choose not to associate with those people. By the way, if the former scenario makes women fear men, then the latter scenario will definitely make men fear women if they haven't already. Wasn't misogyny the hatred, mistrust, and fear of women? Yeah, the thing about sexism is... if you're sexist towards men, it will come back and hit women. If you're sexist towards women, it will come back and hit men. The best thing we can do is get a better understanding of domestic violence and awareness of all types: Man on woman, woman on man, man on man, and woman on woman. Physical, emotional, psychological, financial, and sexual. Oh yeah, I almost forgot to talk about homosexual domestic violence. That puts me in a better boat because the mainstream media doesn't at all. They may try to be daring and talk about "female on male" domestic violence, but I've never seen anyone talk about domestic violence in homosexual relationships. Let's start out with the obvious, it's kind of not politically correct. And not to mention because of all of the other problems I've mentioned here, many people don't think it happens. It happens more frequently than you think. People don't think that this exists because stupid people think "without one man and one woman, abuse can't happen." Adults have kind of realized that men can punch men and women can punch women. People don't talk about because "if we don't portray every homosexual relationship as absolutely perfect, stupid people will use it as an argument against gay marriage." Whether that sentiment is right or wrong it makes it very hard for homosexual victims of domestic violence to be noticed. And that's what it comes down to. When we make up stories and people for sympathy or charity, the actual people and the actual stories end up getting none. Less dramatic, but more realistic women's stories aren't seen as actual abuse. Men end up getting arrested by their abuser's false accusation (and also refused help), and homosexual abusive relationships are completely ignored. Even if Screams in Silence wasn't the stupidly written, sexist, backwards trash that it actually is, I'd probably still have problems with it. 1. pb.rcpsych.org/content/35/1/33… 2. breakingthescience.org/Simplif…